Cardigan Carrying Librarian

A short story of institutional repositories, slaves, politics and the media.

Thomas Thistlewood was a slaver. Living in Jamaica in the 18th century his diaries detail the everyday oppressive conditions of his slaves, including the important connection between the black and white communities forged by white women, who while they were sexually exploited by white men also carried knowledge of the communities back and forward.

A 1994 History Masterâ€™s thesis about Thistlewood, â€œThomas Thistlewood and Women Slavesâ€ by Karen Rule (Rule, 1994) has rocketed in popularity on the UC research repository. There have been almost 2,000 downloads in the last week alone: far more than have looked at it since it was uploaded in 2010.

Why the sudden interest? A bit of detective work found that it was all about US congressional politics and media hyperbole.

I thought that because of the interest in recent domestic servitude and slavery cases in Europe and the US, people were searching about womenâ€™s slavery, but Google analytics showed that people were searching for information on Thomas Thistlewood. That l then lead them to Ruleâ€™s thesis, one of the top results in a Foogle search. In fact, looking at Google Trends, searches for Thistlewood have become very popular recently.

Google Trends search for “Thomas Thistlewood”

The answer to why Thistlewood had become so suddenly interesting came when I looked at a Google news search. Martin Bashir, a US TV news anchor had criticised Alaska Governor Sarah Palinâ€™s claim that the US was a slave to Chinese financial debt. In doing that, he had referenced Thistlewood, and some of the appalling acts that had Thistlewood had documented in disciplining the slaves. Palin had struck back, and Bashir had to apologise. (Ballhaus, 2013)

This had caused a swell in interest in Thistlewood, hence the searches, and the interest in the material in the repository which was one of googleâ€™s top results.

Note: the UC Research repository holds almost 10,000 theses and research articles created by scholars at the the University of Canterbury. It is one of the top 100 institutional repositories in the world. (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas, 2013)